Esther’s Choice — And Ours by Joyce Zonana

This year, February 28th, the 14th of Adar on the Jewish calendar, is the first night of Purim, a holiday the orthodox Chabad organization blithely calls the “most fun-filled, action-packed day of the Jewish year.” Purim is celebrated with two full readings of the Megillah–the Book of Esther–in synagogues; whenever the tale’s villain Haman is mentioned, congregants drown out his name with noisemakers and foot-stomping. Children and adults masquerade and often cross-dress. Plays are performed; Haman is burned in effigy. After a daylong fast, everyone shares a festive meal, where drinking is encouraged, even mandated:

It all sounds like great fun. But what exactly are we celebrating when we celebrate Purim?

Children dressed for Purim celebration

The official explanation is that Purim commemorates the triumph of the Jewish people, saved by Queen Esther after being threatened with extermination in the 5th century B.C.E. by the Persian king, Ahaseurus. As the Book of Esther has it, Ahaseurus had ordered all his subjects to bow before his viceroy Haman. When Mordecai, a Jew, refuses, Haman persuades the king to annihilate the entire people:

And the letters were sent by posts into all the king’s provinces, to destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women. (3.13)

It is only Esther’s strategic intervention that saves the day, as she persuades Ahaseurus—who cannot revoke his own orders—to issue a second edict, authorizing resistance:

the king granted the Jews which were in every city to gather themselves together, and to stand for their life, to destroy, to slay and to cause to perish, all the power of the people and province that would assault them. (8.11)

The opening chapters of the Book explain how it is that Esther, a Jewish orphan, comes to be Queen of Persia. Some time earlier, at a great feast celebrating his reign, Ahaseurus had ordered his men

To bring Vashti the queen before the king with the crown royal, to shew the people and the princes her beauty: for she was fair to look on. (1.11)

When Vashti disobeys, the King is enraged. His chamberlains advise him to punish her:

“For this deed of the queen shall come abroad unto all women, so that they shall despise their husbands in their eyes.” (1.17)

The King banishes Vashti. And further, to shore up his own–and all–patriarchal authority, he issues a decree, “that every man should bear rule in his own house” (1.22).

It’s an absurd decree, establishing Ahaseurus as a tyrant and a fool, the kind of man who would later attempt to punish all Jews for one man’s actions, the kind of man who may remind us of the current leader of the free world.

Enter Esther, Mordecai’s cousin and ward. The king, bereft without Vashti, has been sampling all the virgins in his kingdom. Esther, who hides her Jewishness, “finds favor” with him and is crowned Queen. Hence she is particularly well-placed to intervene on her people’s behalf when Ahaseurus issues his dreadful decree.

Mordecai appeals for her help, but Esther at first refuses, saying that anyone who appears before the king without being summoned is put to death. After Mordecai reminds her that she will die anyway, Esther chooses to risk all, famously saying:

“If I perish, I perish.” (4.16)

Esther asks Mordecai to order a three day fast among the Jews and prepares herself to “come unto the king.” Once again, she “finds favor” with Ahaseurus, and she carefully leads him to a new perception of Haman, Mordecai, the Jews, and, perhaps implicitly, women. In the end, the festival of Purim is decreed, and Esther records her own history.

“Esther and Ahaseurus” by Francois Langrenee, 18th Century France

It’s a stirring tale, beautifully written, replete with intriguing parallels and reversals that recall the frame tale for the Thousand and One Nights: Esther is a sort of Shahrazad, and Ahaseurus very much like Shahrayar. Although it never mentions God, commentators viewed the Book of Esther as bearing witness to God’s “non-miraculous providence.” Yet, as most Biblical scholars agree, there is no historical evidence for it: “The object of Esther is undoubtedly to give an explanation of and to exalt the Feast of Purim, of whose real origin little or nothing is known” (The Jewish Encyclopedia).

The Feast of Purim, a carnival day with its cross-dressing, drunkenness, and general merrymaking—like Mardi Gras and the ancient Greater Dionysia celebrated during this season—can be seen as a sort of queer festival, a day when the doors of perception are cleansed, allowing us to experience the reconciliation of apparent opposites: Mordecai and Haman, Esther and Vashti, good and evil, male and female, rich and poor, gentile and Jew.

moment of transition from a world in which women were humanly and socially powerful because divinity was in part female, to a world in which that divinity and power were repressed. (49)

Yet the Book of Esther tells a story in which women’s power is not so much repressed as affirmed. The king who banishes one queen submits to the will of another. Although male commentators contrasted what they saw as Esther’s humility and obedience with Vashti’s defiance, numerous women writers of various ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have found inspiration in the stories of both Esther and Vashti’s courage and disobedience. Consider abolitionist Angelina Grimke, who, in her 1836 “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” wrote:

“If there were but one Esther at the South, she might save her country from ruin; but let the . . . women there arise . . . and that salvation is certain.”

If, as many scholars have noted, Esther’s name is a version of the Babylonian Ishtar, perhaps her Book recounts, not the successful repression of a Goddess but Her triumphant return.

One community where I spent Purim a few years ago, instituted the practice of ringing bells for Esther rather than drowning out Haman. We made flags with little bells along the edges and waved them whenever Esther was mentioned. Celebrate the positive!

Thanks, Jill. I learned it from Carol Kestler z’l. I remember researching the origin at the time, and knew it came from you, but I didn’t remember well enough to give it the proper attribution. I will do so in future.

A couple of thoughts — it does seem, in fact, perhaps Ishtar evolved into Esther by way of the women themselves who practiced the religion — and if that is true — the evolution fits the process in real life by way of feminism and religion. The Ishtar statue illustrated here also says many things in terms of self-reliance — she holds her own breasts, likewise her feet are firmly planted — and she’s not smiling for the camera, rather her facial expression seems to say very simply, “I am who I am.”

Very interesting. Years and years ago, I read a novel about Esther, Ahaseurus, et al. Your comparison of Ahaseurus to the current occupant of the Oval Office made me laugh. Yes, indeed, we women should carry the message through time. L-o-n-g time!

We live in a time of photography, with so much visual data, both from the past and our own pictorial history. Just that photo here with the four children dressed up in those gorgeous colors celebrating Purim…absolutely priceless.

I love this so much, wish I could’ve read your article two weeks ago. You make it all so vivid. We just released Queen Esther to our Goddess Project: Made in Her Image -https://plus.google.com/u/0/107287050579003737566/posts/1j6uwSU657y

It’s probably useful to consider the theory that the Book of Esther is a parody of the Jewish situation in Babylonia, and the “saving of the Jews” is a hyper-exaggeration of Jewish power in the vast Babylonian empire. If so, identifying Esther with Ishtar is a way of dramatically claiming that Jewish power. But it may also be an unconscious resurrection of the goddess within Jewish women.